New rate of stratospheric photolysis questions ozone hole

These images show its size each September over the past years, as derived from GOME, GOME-2 and SCIAMACHY satellite data. - click to enlarge

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

Dr. Will Happer of Princeton wrote “The Montreal Protocol to ban freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC. Many current IPCC players gained fame then by stampeding the US Congress into supporting the Montreal Protocol. They learned to use dramatized, phony scientific claims like “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” (President Bush Sr’s seaside residence in New England). The ozone crusade also had business opportunities for firms like Dupont to market proprietary “ozone-friendly” refrigerants at much better prices than the conventional (and more easily used) freons that had long-since lost patent protection and were not a cheap commodity with little profit potential” (link).

Even James Lovelock agrees. James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment. He later became concerned that global warming would upset the balance and leave only the arctic as habitable. He began to move off this position in 2007 suggesting that the Earth itself is in “no danger” because it would stabilize in a new state.

James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist:

“I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.”

On a March 2010 Guardian interview, Lovelock opined:

“The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing…We do need skepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.”

Will Happer further elaborated:

“The Montreal Protocol may not have been necessary to save the ozone, but it had limited economic damage. It has caused much more damage in the way it has corrupted science. It showed how quickly a scientist or activist can gain fame and fortune by purporting to save planet earth. We have the same situation with CO2 now, but CO2 is completely natural, unlike freons. Planet earth is quite happy to have lots more CO2 than current values, as the geological record clearly shows. If the jihad against CO2 succeeds, there will be enormous economic damage, and even worse consequences for human liberty at the hands of the successful jihadists.”

LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature:

As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change.

Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

“This must have far-reaching consequences,” Rex says. “If the measurements are correct we can basically no longer say we understand how ozone holes come into being.” What effect the results have on projections of the speed or extent of ozone depletion remains unclear.

STILL COMING

Yet like the cultists whose spacecraft didn’t arrive on the announced date, the government scientists find ways to postpone it and save their reputations (examples “Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests” here and “Scientists Find Antarctic Ozone Hole to Recover Later than Expected” here.

“The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” Dr. John Brignell, Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton, on Number Watch (May 1) PDF

Far too oft, the political and emotional values of individuals outweighs the data, and allows many people to alter the data to fit the theory, rather than altering the theory to fit the data.

The precautionary principle would seem to be far more applicable to the nature of alarmism than the problem it purports to solve, that of environmental disaster. There is no net downside to opening the data to interpretation by others, and many possible benefits. If nothing else, the precaution of open data, open methods, and open communication and review should be part of that scientific method.

If the data are proprietary, then likely it is best they not be used for public purposes. If the system is paid for out of the public exchequer, then it is likely that the public has a far heavier proprietary interest in the outcome of the data than the scientists in question, and that fact of public funding predicates openness in any arrangement.

As a whole, science is damaged otherwise. It should never be dogmatic, never about emotions or outcomes, but simply about what the truth is. Outcomes are the business of demagogues, zealots, and politicians, not scientists.

That science is the pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lay, in spite of any personal antipathy toward the nature of the truth revealed.

I often refer to the ozone hole/CFC ban scam as the pilot episode for global warming – the series. Of course even is were could thoroughly discredit the specious science upon which the CFC ban was enacted, we could never go back to using cheap, safe and effective CFCs because now they’re “powerful GHGs”. Like AGW, none of the studies at the time of the great CFC imbroglio ever centered on natural causes and variability of Antarctic stratospheric ozone thinning. It was assumed that it had to me man-made.

Few of us stop to consider exactly what the CFC ban costs were to society. Refrigeration and A/C became much more expensive. Millions of otherwise perfectly functioning poeces of equipment had to be scrapped.

“Global warming consensus coming apart after Montreal is slicked off by North American Ice Sheet return!”
This CFC thing was Bravo Sierra from the word go, I participated as a pilot in several CFC monitoring flights, back in the late 70’s. NOAA and Battelle could not find any real correlation . I’d like to know if the Gore family invested in the replacement Refrigerants.
The hole is Solar and Atmosphere driven,period..

When it comes to the ozone hole, I always wondered how freon destroyed the ozone over the Antarctic in the southern hemisphere when the majority of people and the majority of air conditioners were in the northern hemisphere.

Freon was replaced with Puron, R-410A. I have a friend who owns his own HVAC business so I ask about refrigerants from time to time. Puron is hard to work and it requires different tools and gauges. Puron also is big greenhouse gas, and so strict measures have to be taken to reclaim any puron. (It is not really “pure” then, is it?) When I started looking into freon and puron, that is when I started to question consensus science.

The freon debacle didn’t start the activist scientists. Before the freon scare, there was the acid rain scare. Before the acid rain scare, there was the DDT scare. What the freon scare did was to give the activists an understanding of how to quickly push bad science through so that their real agenda would come to pass. The freon scare showed how a scare can done. The next step was to add an agenda along with the scare.

When I was a child I was really worried about what would happen to our planet, extinction of all those beautyfull fluffy animal species, polution, cancer etc. It was the age of the Club of Rome. None of their doomsday predictions have came true, the biggest problem we are facing in my home area is not overpopulation but lack of births, not health threatening polution but dramatically increasing longevity. Then the ozone hole and acid rain came and we were confronted with pictures of Australians hiding themselves under wide hats. We were informed about crop damages skinnn cancer and the damned drycleaners- tri-chorine-ethylene- (I hope this is the correct English spelling) was a popular detergent at the time for drycleaning, both for domestic and professional use- no fire hazard – great chemical. But then that was banned. I have little doubt that the pretty much worldwide ban on CFC has done some good but I stil resent the hype surrounding it. Mostly predominantly I resent the systematic brainwash our children are subject to through media and education feeding them with politically correct misinformation in the eco ideology. That is why this article is really encouraging and heartwarming.

Twenty years ago I was dubious of the science behind the ozone hole but I could accept it because it didn’t cost that much and most countries got on board. Today not only people but countries are jumping off the co2 bandwagon eg Japan and most of the important players don’t even want to get involved.I think its time for a full court press from the skeptic community to try to get most of this bad news for agw into the mainstream press. They have to feel enough heat so they’ll get out of the kitchen!

Nice try, but, that experiment is as bad as the one under question. Where are the actual measurements of impurities and spectra for them?? They simply reduced the CI2O2 and claim the smaller absorption shows there were impurities?? How do we know how THEIR impurities are affecting the experiment since they apprently made no effort to identify what was there and what it was doing??

One thing not mentioned was the ban also included the propellants used in inhalers for the many millions of people suffering from asthma (as I do) or COPD. The new formulations were no longer available in low cost generic form and the prices of the inhalers skyrocketed. Big pharma was all too glad to make the change and rake it in.

the real experiment is happening over the Antarctic every winter. It varies like everything else we know in the universe. Have you even bothered to look back at the earlier data?? None of it would be out of place in modern measurements. There is no there there and never was.

Remember Steig and others have shown that the Antarctic warmed quickly from about the 50’s to about the 70’s and has been pretty flat since then. The O hole seemed to increase in size about the same time. Are they connected? Which caused which?? Strat temps seem to be more important than particular chemical make-up, yet, why aren’t we screaming about strat cooling causing the hole?? Cause they can’t come up with an anthro connection that is plausible though they have tried!!

I have little doubt that the pretty much worldwide ban on CFC has done some good…

Sorry, but I really don’t like this attitude. There is no way such a statement can be made in the absence of reliable data. The whole thing was a farce and nothing good can be said about it unless you’re willing to do some real science and show the benefit. Lacking that, zero tolerance for pseudoscience is the order of the day.

Don’t forget that in many jusistictions it is illegal to service your own AC system thanks to this. Money was made hand over fist when fundamental environmentalists, law makers, and big business got together.

The Precautionary Principle tells us that we should never bathe, because the single biggest cause of accidents and death in the home is the bath. Baths should be outlawed, or heavily taxed, with a cap on new bath construction. Those houses that do not install baths should be able to sell their rights to build a bath to those houses that want to install a second bath. This will create a market for baths and new opportunities for employment.

This will be a win-win for the environment. As we reduce the number of baths this will reduce the demand for water from our lakes and rivers, preserving our natural heritage. The saving in energy previously used to heat bath water will significantly reduce the amount of CO2 released into the environment, maintaining the planet at its optimum temperature.

One thing not mentioned was the ban also included the propellants used in inhalers for the many millions of people suffering from asthma (as I do) or COPD.
___________________________________________________________
Joe,
You might find the following article from Feb 2010 in the American Thinker interesting:http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_cfc_ban_global_warmings_pi.html

“Lin’s group has proposed another set of values, but its results may not be the last word on the issue, he says.”

I’ve paid some attention to the ozone issue because it fits with the science that I have seen in connection with the fact that the stratosphere appears to cool when the sun is active (less ozone and a larger hole overall) and warm when the sun is less active (more ozone and a smaller ozone hole overall) which is contrary to established climatology.

I think the problem is that established climatology places too much weight on ozone effects below the stratopause where the usual assumptions do hold true. However it now seems to me that the opposite process applies above the stratopause and in global net terms it is the upper portion that is dominant thereby altering the entire vertical temperature profile so as to affect pressure distribution in the troposphere and thereby change regional climates and the entire global energy budget.

On considering all the evidence that we have I find that the ozone hole must grow and the stratosphere and mesosphere must cool together naturally when the sun is more active and the opposite when the sun is less active.

Blaming both the cooling stratosphere and increased size of the ozone hole at a time of more active sun on human intervention was a major error and has yet to be recognised as such.

Lovelock seems to be mentally unstable. He invents Gaia as a mythical entity for Earth worshippers, but says he isn’t religious. He knows how insecure climatologists are, and how flaky the Global Warming conjecture, yet he ponders to remove democracy because authoritarian regimes would be better in pushing through total CO2 emission reductions.

Had he ever been able to think before opening his mouth, the world would be a saner place today, with less insane books and less insane followers.

So, what I understand about the ozone hole is that it appears during the Antarctic winter, then disappears as it “warms up”. The wind currents help isolate the stratosphere and isolate the atmosphere, increasing the rate of depletion.

I can’t help but notice this is both seasonal and isolated, and that the conditions center around the cold forming “natural” ozone depletion agents (and, by the by, the Ozone Hole Website states CFCs are formed by sulfuric acid, nitric acid and ice, which is interesting as none of those molecules contain either carbon or chlorine). If the cold is the cause of the ozone drop because conditions are ideal for ozone depletion, then it stands to reason that the Little Ice Age was a very bad time for ozone globally. Of course, we weren’t measuring ozone back then, so making conclusions about the destruction of the ozone without historical data is alarmist, at best.

Dr. Dave says:
January 8, 2011 at 8:45 am
Few of us stop to consider exactly what the CFC ban costs were to society. Refrigeration and A/C became much more expensive. Millions of otherwise perfectly functioning poeces of equipment had to be scrapped.

Not to mention the number of people burned in fires which could have been controlled by Halon extinguishers.

Why spend money defending freon when it was losing its patent protection? Better to let the cheap stuff get banned and sell the more expensive replacement. Same was true with DDT which was off patent and cheap.
We need to find a way to protect diffuse interests or things will continue to organize in a manner that maximizes the benefits of concentrated interests. The ozone hole and DDT are simply emergent properties of the system. A difficult problem and not sure of an answer.

It’s great to see Lovelock getting something of a rehabilitation in this article. I have been saying for a long time that his first book on the Gaia hypothesis is a *must read* for anyone interested in Earth and it’s atmosphere and oceans.

Not wanting to go too much off topic but the Lovelock Gaia hypothesis cuts two ways.

If the Earth is a self stabilising system with an agenda of its own then we are part of it and we are Gaia’s creation as are all our works and the consequences of them.

Who is to say that the ultimate intent of Gaia is not a world with far less diversity and with a single supreme species that in due course learns how to restrain population growth voluntarily and is entitled to use the Earth’s vast resources freely in the meantime?

The UN population figures keep bringing forward the date when global population will peak before a slow long term decline develops. Industrial activity and its consequent wealth always results in a breeding rate less than replacement level.

One could even propose that excessive environmental protection is against the broader concept of Gaia and likely to delay the eventual outcome required by Gaia.

Anyway, back to the topic. The ozone issue is now starting to look as flaky as the CO2 issue because much the same processes are involved. Namely the effect of variations in the mix of photons and particles received from the sun on the upper atmosphere with a consequent change in the energy budget of the entire globe.

And it looks like solar/atmospheric chemistry is the real issue and not radiative physics.

I believe that that measurements taken in Antarctica during the IGY in 1957-1958 may show an ozone hole. If the data could be recovered from some archive, it could prove the existance of a large winter ozone hole over the Antarctic before Freon was common as in later decades.

Pops says:
January 8, 2011 at 9:37 amI have little doubt that the pretty much worldwide ban on CFC has done some good…

Sorry, but I really don’t like this attitude. There is no way such a statement can be made in the absence of reliable data. The whole thing was a farce and nothing good can be said about it unless you’re willing to do some real science and show the benefit. Lacking that, zero tolerance for pseudoscience is the order of the day.

“Lin’s group has proposed another set of values, but its results may not be the last word on the issue, he says.”

No doubt. My only point was that the original citation was outdated. A skeptical viewpoint requires accurate information, and why have an obviously outdated link sitting there as a softball ready to be whacked?

With regard to your comments about stratospheric cooling, I would be interested in whatever you’ve found with regard to observed vs. modeled stratospheric temps. As I’m sure you know, stratospheric temperatures have responded to major volcanic eruptions by increasing significantly and then reestablishing a new but lower baseline. AGW proponents have grasped onto this by emphasizing the downward long term “trend” and claiming it to be “consistent with” climate models, even though the behavior is in no way, shape, or form linear.

Usually, I see just hand-waving or simple denial when the stepwise nature is pointed out, but on occasion, I’ve seen “modeled” vs “observed” results shown, such as here (poor resolution unfortunately).

I’ve been meaning to look into the details of the “modeled” curve, but haven’t had time. Have you looked into these in detail, and why would a volcanic eruption establish a new baseline?

This comment by Lovelock was a part of the interview:
“There has been a lot of speculation that a very large glacier [Pine Island glacier] in Antarctica is unstable. If there’s much more melting, it may break off and slip into the ocean. It would be enough to produce an immediate sea-level rise of two metres, something huge, and tsunamis.”

Is there actually that much mass in this glacier to physically raise sea levels this much by simply adding the ice mass to the ocean or would it have to melt first (which would remove heat and help keep rise contained)?

Also from wikipedia:
“U.S. Patent #3258500) was set to expire in 1979. In conjunction with other industrial peers DuPont sponsored efforts such as the “Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy” to question anti-CFC science, but in a turnabout in 1986 DuPont, with new patents in hand, publicly condemned CFCs. DuPont representatives appeared before the Montreal Protocol urging that CFCs be banned worldwide and stated that their new HCFCs would meet the worldwide demand for refrigerants.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon

From the book Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan, starting at page 252,

First, CFCs don’t rise in significant amounts to where they need to be for UV-C photons to break them up. Because ozone absorbs heat directly from the sun’s rays, the stratosphere exhibits a reverse temperature structure, or thermal “inversion” – it gets warmer with altitude, rather than cooler. … Hence the number of CFC splittings is vastly lower than the original hypothesis assumes, for the same reason that there aren’t many marriages between Eskimos and Australian aborigines: the partners that need to come together don’t mix very much.

For the UV photons that do make it, there are 136 million oxygen molecules for the to collide with for every CFC – and every such reaction with create oxone, not destroy it. So even if we allow the big cfc molecule three times the chance of a small oxygen molecule of being hit, then 45 million ozone molecules will still be created for every CFC molecule that’s broken up. Hardly a convincing disaster scenario, is it?

Ah, but what about the catalytic effect, whereby one chlorine atom can eat up thousands of ozone molecules? Doesn’t that change the picture?

Not really. The catalysis argument depends on encounters between chlorine monoxide and free oxygen atoms. But the chances are much higher that a wandering free oxygen atom will find a molecule of normal oxygen rather than one of chlorine monoxide. So once again, probability favors ozone creation over ozone destruction.

At least 192 chemical reactions occur between substances in the upper stratosphere, along with 48 different, identifiable photochemical processes, all linked through complex feedback mechanisms that are only partly understood. Selecting a few reactions brought about in a laboratory and claiming that this is what happens in the stratosphere (where it has never been measured) might be a way of getting to a predetermined conclusion. But it isn’t the end of the world.

But surely it’s been demonstrated! Hasn’t one thousand times more chlorine been measured over the Antarctic than models say ought to be there?

Yes. High concentrations of chlorine – or to be exact, chlorine monoxide. But all chlorine atoms are identical. There is nother to link the chlorine found over the Antarctic with the CFCs from the other end of the world. It might also be mentioned that the measuring station at McMurdo Sound is located 15 kilometers downwind from Mount Erebus, an active volcano currently venting 100 to 200 tons of chlorine every day, and which in 1983 averaged 1,000 tons per day. Mightn’t that have more to do with it than refrigerators in New York or air conditioners in Atlanta?

Sigh.

CFC regulations have more to do with DuPont profit margins than with the ozone hole over the South Pole. Freon had lost its patent protection, it was now a commodity. DuPont needed to have a market for different, and less efficient, refrigerants. The rest is history.

Even as a kid I was getting skeptical about the dangers of cfc’s when the penguins, and marine life just kept on living and living; had they only known they would have been washing up on the coast like the dead, but well-informed, crabs, manatees, and fish of today.

Alexander Vissers says: When I was a child I was really worried about what would happen to our planet, extinction of all those beautyfull fluffy animal species, polution, cancer etc. It was the age of the Club of Rome.

Ah, yes, the Culb Of Rome and the “Running OUT!!!” meme…. (Limits to Growth, Meadows et.al.). Increadibly broken thesis. According to them we ran out of natural gas in 1980 ….

FWIW, I’ve seen reports that The Club of Rome is also behind the AGW scare. I’ve not looked into it much, but it ought to be discoverable.

We are NOT running out of resources.
We are NOT warming the planet with fuel use.
We are NOT hurting the ozone with CFCs.

James Lovelock
“We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science…”

It should be noted that James Lovelock is well qualified to talk about the ozone hole because he invented the electron capture detector, which ultimately assisted in discoveries about the persistence of CFCs and their role in stratospheric ozone depletion.

Giffords also voted to repeal subsidies to big oil companies and invest the savings in renewable energy. “We put our national security at risk by relying on oil from unstable regimes in the Middle East and Latin America,” Giffords told her colleagues in a speech on the House floor during debate on the Clean Energy Act. The act repeals $14 billion in subsidies given to oil companies and establishes a Strategic Renewable Energy Reserve to increase research in clean renewable energy, to develop greater energy efficiency, and to improve energy conservation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Giffords

Wade says:
January 8, 2011 at 8:53 am
“When it comes to the ozone hole, I always wondered how freon destroyed the ozone over the Antarctic in the southern hemisphere when the majority of people and the majority of air conditioners were in the northern hemisphere.”

I have never understood the theory behind, how the use of freons in the Northern Hemishere could have such effect on the Ozone layer above the Antartic partly because of the point made by Wade but also due to the high molecular weight of the chemicals/molecules involved. How do these molecules migrate to such heights in sufficient concentration to break down the Ozone layer in the stratosphere? I have never seen a convincing explanation of this and would appreciate someone enlightening me as to the physical processes involved since it just sounds so far fetched.

The reason the original 2007 nature article was so shocking was because the mechanisms by which CFCs cause ozone depletion are pretty well pinned down. What had happened was a measurement that seemed to contradict the theory.

ge0050 says:
January 8, 2011 at 9:49 am
“The Precautionary Principle tells us that we should never bathe, because the single biggest cause of accidents and death in the home is the bath. Baths should be outlawed, or heavily taxed, with a cap on new bath construction. Those houses that do not install baths should be able to sell their rights to build a bath to those houses that want to install a second bath. This will create a market for baths and new opportunities for employment.”

Geo. you have not got to the lowest common denominator. The correct position is that the majority of accidents occur in the home, such that the precautionary principle dictates that we should ban homes. We should all live in government controlled hostels where the health and safety executive can supervise us and make sure that we do not do anything that may risk causing us harm.

The generic attack has been centered on chlorinated compounds in general. The removal of freon from albuterol inhalers was a travesty and has cost many lives, since the replacement propellants don’t work very well as drug clumping prevents adequate dosing. To apply the Montreal ruling to inhalers containing piddly amounts of freons was borderline criminal.

With DDT and afterwards the chlorinated pesticides, they were all sequentially banned. The replacements were pyrethrins and nerve poisons, e.g. the malathion class, both classes which are potent allergens and sensitizers to allergens. Chlorinated pesticides had no immunological potential, and were harmless to mammals. Indeed, GIs in WWII used to dust themselves with pure DDT powder for lice.

The chlorinated’s substitution coincides with increased allergies of all types. We never heard of widespread peanut and other allergies up until the 80s. There were only a handful of allergists in the 50s and 60s, but today they are everywhere, and asthma is increasing by leaps and bounds. Look up cross sensitization in immunology for the complete explanation. This is another of the myriad examples of the Law of Unintended (or sometimes Intended?) Consequences.

Did Rachel Carson and the greenies sentence us to immunological armageddon? Maybe I am being too paranoid—let me spray some more Raid around the basement, I think I saw a cricket…

“At least 192 chemical reactions occur between substances in the upper stratosphere, along with 48 different, identifiable photochemical processes, all linked through complex feedback mechanisms that are only partly understood.”

Thanks Jack. I had discovered that there were lots but had given up counting.

Suffice it to say that that supports my posts very effectively.

What we should be looking at is the ozone destruction/creation balance above the stratopause. It is a matter of chemistry and not radiative physics at all. Radiative physics is only relevant to the way the system responds to the chemical forcings.

Atmospheric chemistry responding to aolar variations changes the vertical temperature profile for a pressure redistribution at the surface and the consequent cloudiness/albedo effects alter the balance of the global energy budget with the oceans as a variable modulator. Voila.

You can see it yourself with liquids and solids. Given enough time, sugar (which is heavier than water) will dissolve (even without stirring) and make a uniform aqueous solution. Although under certain circumstances (very high concentrations and absolute stillness), stratification can be observed, with any bit of disturbance and “normal” movement, the uniformity will be maintained.

A combination of molecular motion and turbulence leads to uniform mixing of gases in the atmosphere as long as the gases remain below their saturation pressure.

This is not in dispute by any branch of science, and real measurements show the presence of heavy gases in the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

Well, I’m glad to see finally someone is putting pen to paper regarding the older bit of alarmism. Looking at the pretty pictures at the top, once again we see a respiration, or a sine wave, if you will, or a cycle! As was noted earlier, we only became mindful of it when we had a chance to measure. We don’t know if it isn’t suppose to be there, its insane to postulate. As noted also, the propellants in the inhalers were changed and significantly increased in price. I would put the cost much higher than a few dollars made by unscrupulous companies. People died because of these frauds. Of course, its difficult to blame the drug companies and GE and all the rest. If they started to research and found the science to be questionable, how many alarmist would jump up and lump them with the tobacco industry? Just about all of them. Just like today, the myth that energy companies are behind the skepticism is stated on a daily basis. They happen to be very much excited about the prospects of putting a premium on CO2 emissions.

John M said:
“With regard to your comments about stratospheric cooling, I would be interested in whatever you’ve found with regard to observed vs. modeled stratospheric temps.”

Never mind the models, this is reality:

During the late 20th century warming trend the stratosphere was observed to
cool and that was also supposed to be in accordance with AGW. However since
the 90s that cooling has ceased and the stratospheric temperature trend is now
one of slight warming:

“The evidence for the cooling trend in the stratosphere may need to be revisited.
This study presents evidence that the stratosphere has been slightly warming
since 1996.”

Cooling stratosphere when the sun was active. Cessation of cooling and slight warming when the sun becomes less active.

AGW theory requires a warming of the entire atmospheric column when the sun is more active. It didn’t happen so CO2 and CFCs were fingered as the culprits.

CO2 is now out of the frame because CO2 continues to rise despite the change in stratospheric temperature trend.

CFCs are nominally still in the frame because the Montreal Protocol led to a reduction so that could still be blamed. But ask yourself. At the time did anyone ever blame the stratospheric cooling at a time of active sun on CFCs – ALONE. ?

No, of course they didn’t. Far too implausible. So scrub CFCs too and all we have left is solar effects on upper atmospheric chemistry.

And that goes for both stratospheric temeperature trends AND ozone hole trends.

So, essentially all of the actual scientific content in this post is based on one Nature story from 2007 describing one scientific article (and, by the way, not having anything close to the title that Joe D’Aleo gave to the link above) and, as John M has pointed out, superceded by a more recent 2009 Nature story saying that a new study concluded that the 2007 study was wrong: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090507/full/news.2009.456.html

That is pretty thin support with which to base the claim “LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY” on!

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs.

…

Yet like the cultists whose spacecraft didn’t arrive on the announced date, the government scientists find ways to postpone it and save their reputations (examples “Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests” here and “Scientists Find Antarctic Ozone Hole to Recover Later than Expected” here.

And, yet, it was never claimed that the ozone whole would close off very quickly once CFCs were banned. And, the second article refers to a revised estimate that it will take until 2068 rather than ~2050 for the recovery to occur. Unless these scientists time-traveled into the future, it seems unlikely that this revision was based on the fact that it had not yet recovered as expected.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that the recovery is significantly off-schedule. In fact, this article from 2006 suggests the recovery is starting to occur in line with what models predict and the one puzzle is why it seems to be occurring a bit faster than expected in the lower part of the stratosphere (while the upper stratosphere recovery is basically right on what is expected): http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060527093645.htm

As yoda might say: “Impressed with the science in Joe D’Aleo’s post, I am not.”

BTW, it was intended to prohibit the refrigerant R 134a from 1st Jan 2011, and the replacement R 1234-yf is FLAMMABLE. If you are driving a car and need new coolant for your A/C, you might get R 1234-yf. It looks like the industry doesn’t switch on the intended date but will take a while. Reason for the switch is of course the greenhouse gas properties of R 134a.

I would strongly recommend against crashing your car after this replacement. Also, keep a hammer nearby so you can smash windows to jump out of your car before you burn to death, or alternatively, keep a pistol nearby, like WW I pilots who would shoot themselves to evade the painful death by fire.

The industry will surely keep silent about this. The German ADAC tested the new refrigerant last year, and it ignited when coming into contact with the hot motor parts.

The history of refrigerant switches is driven by all the alarmist agendas; see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane
“History
1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane first appeared in the early 1990s as a replacement for dichlorodifluoromethane (R-12), which has ozone depleting properties.[6] 1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane has been atmospherically modeled for its impact on depleting ozone and as a contributor to global warming. Research suggests that over the past 10 years the concentration of 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane has increased significantly in the Earth’s atmosphere, with a recent study revealing a doubling in atmospheric concentration between 2001–2004.[7] It has insignificant ozone depletion potential (ozone layer), significant global warming potential (100-yr GWP = 1430)[8] and negligible acidification potential (acid rain).”

There seems to be some disagreement between posters here about the motive for the banning of CFCs.
Some accuse big business of promoting a ban to enable them to replace cheap, low profit materials with expensive patented high-profit alternatives.
Others seem to imply that it was a ‘dry run’ by the environmental lobby for further global agreements to regulate private industry.

That Du Pont and others resisted the scientific case made by the environmental lobby until they had alternatives indicates that the environmental lobby were the prime movers in this global regulation.

Their main evidence was the observed reduction in ozone levels during the Antarctic spring when previously the return of sunlight had increased the ozone levels.
CFCs were blamed for the additional photochemistry that was causing this depletion.

I am not sure that the thread essay absolves CFCs or offers any alternative explanation for the observed depletion of ozone.

James Lovelock: “Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but…”

Whilst I agree with the overall message behind what he is saying, it pains me that he can’t seem to resist lapsing into such idiocy. Firstly, he clearly doesn’t even understand the definition of the word “literally.” Secondly, he follows a blatantly religious statement with the contradiction that he is “not religious.”

So I say to James: please, would you just stick to the bloody science and leave the emotive bullshit to the politicians. You are damaging science, as politicians have damaged politics.

Look at the environmental movement as a self organizing system. Over the past forty years it has gained significant organized power or buffering. As this system gained energy it attracted more and more rent seeking adding to system stability. Science is but one small component of this complex system that now touches most aspects of our daily lives and forms a large part of our belief systems. The biggest mistake we make is thinking any scientific “proof” can generate the force needed to overcome this system’s stability.

As an example- Many environmental issues are part of an overall ideology and contrary information causes cognitive dissonance, information theory says we can never get the public’s attention long enough to undo the “incorrect” facts and then argue the “correct” facts. Regulatory Theory says the agencies will organize and promote the culture that formed it. Crisis theory says the Public believes the first message it hears with respect to a crisis and is resistant to all future contrary messages. Look at the financial resources of the NGOs. Look at the incentives of the media, academia, legal etc. How do diffuse interests survive?

We are the diffuse interest. We have less resources- we have less tools, we are behind the information curve, we have lost academia and we have no government agency promoting our interests. I put little hope in any one study no matter how much “proof”. I’m old enough to have been on the ground during the DDT “debate” and acid rain. Scientific evidence meant nothing in the face of the pressures allied against it. I’ve just watched a bill contrary to everything we know pass in New Jersey designed to “protect our estuaries” that will set back any recovery hope decades. (It claimed increased development and the associated fertilizer runoff was killing a bay despite the fact both nitrogen and chlorophyll a have been trending down for the last 50 years by their own data. )

We need to focus not on why the science is ignored but how. Environmental groups think strategically- we do not. We continue to lose. We need a system analysis.

I’ve said it before but I don’t mind saying it again. Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts are giant heroes whose efforts on behalf of Truth and Humanity are enormous and humbling to the rest of us. There is no one on this planet that I admire and respect more than I do Joe and Anthony.

You make my point for me. No one ever said that stratospheric cooling at a time of active sun was down to CFCs alone, it was supposed to be mainly from CO2 but CFCs as well.

However Leif Svalgaard certainly said to me that he thought the cooling mesosphere was down to CFCs.

However CO2 is now out of the frame because CO2 continues to increase yet the stratospheric temperature trend has changed.

So to be consistent any AGW proponent now has to change his position and aver that the stratospheric cooling trend must have been caused by more CFCs alone. That is how they can now suggest that the recent warming trend is due to less CFCs alone.

So not only do CFC’s have to cause a change in trend to warming on their own but also they have to first overcome a supposed continuing and increasing cooling trend from even more CO2.

So, John M, the logical implication is that CFCs were the sole (or overwhelming) culprit as regards global temperature changes and that CFCs are now under control so presumably we can stop worrying about CO2 ?

Did anybody get as far as reading the last paragraph of the Nature article?…

‘Nothing currently suggests that the role of CFCs must be called into question, Rex stresses. “Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss. But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions.”’

In 2002. I was tasked with determining whether to shut down the UARS spacecraft program. One of the justifications for keeping it operational was that it was one of the prime data source for Ozone Hole monitoring. When presented with the record of ozone hole max/min extent, it was obvious that “the Hole” somehow was ignoring all the hype, the “science” and the politics. Since I knew the person who “discovered” the Hole, I asked him about it. The answer was that the Hole was real, but the “science” was pure hype. His theory was that it was a natural occurrence that varied on a periodic basis based on factors that were never later pursued. He was NOT the person who was credited with discovering the Hole – that person stole the credit by pubishing first.

From the Liu and Weng paper linked it appears that stratospheric temperature changes, the fall up till 96 and the small rise since, correlates best with the ozone levels than any measured variation or trend in solar UV emissions.

Meanwhile there is an unexplained cooling and contraction of the thermosphere layer above the stratosphere.

We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done.

F-ing Christ, folks. Back when this was all happening, I KNEW down to my bones that this was all WRONG, that the science could not possibly have been done right in so short a time, that they had all jumped to a bogus conclusion.

Good science BEGINS with the kind of glimpse that began the CFC scare – bit it cannot stay at that level and BE science. Science is proving those glimpses/intuitive leaps beyond a shadow of a doubt. NOTHING I saw at that time was even close to convincing. That Lovelock says this AFTER ALL THIS TIME, the sack of mierda, is TERRIBLE. Where was he THEN?

I think it was felt there was far too much inequality in science and there was an enormous redress. . . but in some special professions you want the best, the elite. Elitism is important in science. It is vital.

No kidding. Curies and Maxwells and Laplaces don’t grow on freaking trees. Those minds that lead the way – WHERE ARE THE GREAT ONES FROM THIS GENERATION AND THE PREVIOUS ONES? They have been muddled down with the rest, fighting for government grants. What a terrible thing for the human race, to blend the mediocre in with the great and get a lot of so-so’s.

Nowadays if you’re dependent on a grant – and 99% of them are – you can’t make mistakes as you won’t get another one if you do.

THIS IS WHERE BAD SCIENCE ORIGINATES.

The worst thing that ever happened to science was the Manhattan Project. The history of science can be divided into two periods – pre-Manhattan and post-Manhattan. Guess which one had all the great discoveries?

I think if they can produce a coup and produce some really good climate research they will undo all the harm that’s been done. And they’ve now got an incentive to do that.

A: Looking at the period since November 2009, we can see how far in that direction things have gone at UEA.
B: Isn’t he even listening to himself? Their incentive is to keep the government money flowing, not to correct themselves. Their idea of good science is to enable more grant money – that is why they are so aligned with the great funding magnet Michael Mann.

The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing. They could be absolutely running the show. We haven’t got the physics worked out yet…

It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.

I can tell you from my work in R&D and engineering in general that the FIRST thing you need to do with a new study is to identify the TOUGH parts, the ones that can screw you all up, and then set to getting them nailed to the wall – before you EVER start putting together the entirety of the study. You have to do that because until those things are known, you don’t know squat about what you are dealing with. For them to go forward with any of this KNOWING that this great unknown is out there is TERRIBLE science!@&$% Shame on them. And shame on Lovelock for not holding their FEET TO THE FIRE, long ago. WTF???

I think the sceptic bloggers should worry. It’s almost certain that you can’t put a trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere without something nasty happening. This is going to resolve itself and global heating is going to come back on stream and it’s these bloggers who are going to be made to look weird when it does. When something like this happens again, they’ll say we had all this before with ‘Climategate’. But there’s a danger that you can go off too strong, like they have. They are not sufficiently aware of the longer-term consequences. I think the sceptics have done us a good service because they’ve made us look at all this a lot more closely and hopefully the science will improve as a result. But everything has a price and an unexpected price may hit these bloggers. It’s the cry-wolf phenomenon. When the real one comes along, they’ll be laughed at.

This is patently unbelievable for Lovelock to bring up “cry wolf” and plaster the skeptic’s wall with it, when the entire global warming thing is all about crying wolf. He had just gotten done saying how the models were not possibly correct and couldn’t do any of the predictions successfully that they had been tasked with. And he had just said how much they had lied their arses off about the CFC/ozone hole thing, and then he points at the SKEPTICS and says WE are the ones crying wolf? My god, the man is so convinced he can’t see the frying pan from the fire. (Yes, I know, that is mixing metaphors… intentionally so.)

The UN was a lovely idea, but its primary objective was to make sure the British Empire was got rid of.

Holy crap, Batman! Is this man Anglo-centric or what? The U.N. created to control the BRITS? This is like months after some guy named Adolf brought Armageddon to most of the civilized world, right? And he is thinking it was all about HIM and his sort? No wonder the man found his way to the top of the eco ego ladder – it is all about HIM and his kind.

On the influence of vested interests:

We shouldn’t let the lobbies influence science. Whatever criticism might befall the IPCC and the UEA, they’re nothing as bad as lobbyists who are politically motivated and who will manipulate data or select data to make their political point. For example, it’s deplorable for the BBC whenever one of these issues comes up to go and ask what one of the green lobbyists thinks of it. Sometimes their view might be quite right, but it might also be pure propaganda. This is wrong. They should ask the scientists, but the problem is scientists won’t speak. If we had some really good scientists it wouldn’t be a problem, but we’ve got so many dumbos who just can’t say anything, or who are afraid to say anything. They’re not free agents.

This can ONLY be addressed to the warmers – that they know they cannot speak out with the truth, because (as I read him) if they soft-pedal or are not “on board” with their every pronouncement, their funding will be cut.

On how humans will ever manage to tackle climate change:

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Yes, we need to abdicate to an Uncle Adolf sometimes, just because Lovelock and his kind didn’t get their way. Notice he wasn’t saying this before Climategate, when the warmers had the bandbox to themselves. NOW that the skeptics have a voice that is being listened to, LET’S NOW GO FIND A DICTATOR, just to shut them the hell up and get back on track. Sometimes in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s people used these same arguments about controlling the Jewish people, who were getting to uppity.

If wind turbines really worked, I wouldn’t object to them. To hell with the aesthetics, we might need them to save ourselves. But they don’t work – the Germans have admitted it.

And if the wind farms don’t work, what is the green alternative? They don’t have one. Every green technology has been a failure, with too little out for the energy or money put into it. All they can do is point at oil and say how ugly and horrible it is, but they don’t have a viable alternative. That is true now, just as it was 30 years ago with solar panels. And if they don’t have a viable alternative, they should STFU and focus on recycling.

Sorry this was so long.

It seems that Lovelock is an idiot egotist who has to keep inserting himself into the dialog, just so we all keep remembering he is still alive, kind of like Ralph Nader. It’s time we all forgot him.

Stephen Wilde says (January 8, 2011 at 10:27 am): “Who is to say that the ultimate intent of Gaia is not a world with far less diversity and with a single supreme species that in due course learns how to restrain population growth voluntarily and is entitled to use the Earth’s vast resources freely in the meantime?”

Or Gaia got tired of being splattered by space debris and tried to engineer intelligent symbiotes to protect her.

I have begun collecting the “Oh, sh*t!” moments in science. I call them collectively “Science does it again.”

In the CFC/ozone hole, we have another new member:

“Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

“Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.”

The hubris of “Look to us for all the answers in our field, because we know everything,” turns – but only for a moment – to, “We humble little sciences are just learning at the feet of nature.”

After they look surreptitiously around a bit and figure that no one is looking anymore, they go back to pontificating about how expert they are. . . and the world keeps turning.

Again, the cooling stratosphere is presumed to be from both GHGs in the troposphere and depleted ozone in the stratosphere. The conventional wisdom is that the recovering ozone is enough to offset the continuing increases in CO2. Decreasing levels of CFCs are what lead to the recovering ozone. The decreasing levels of CFCs impact the total GHGs in the troposphere only slightly. I don’t know if that theory holds together quantitatively, but it’s not unreasonable. I do know that the stratospheric temperature data doesn’t quite make sense (I guess we agree on that?).

I’m trying to get at this quantitatively without just flailing around. I had hoped you might have had some quantitative information that would help me critique the conventional wisdom better.

Whatever agreements we have or don’t have I can’t comment on, since I’m not really sure what your point is. Whether or not you have something on solar activity I don’t know. It would me nice to see Leif’s specific comments about that.

The warmer scientists will continue to promote the fraud as long as the money supports their dishonest claims. There is a trail of added cost to the global warming cause from manufacturer to consumer. When they did away with Freon it became practical because of cost to swap out the entire auto AC system rather than recharge. Intrusion like that into the private market benefits no one except those ready to sell the new government approved product. And politicians.

Despite what a many are suggesting or implying, the CFC scam was not a victimless crime. The removal of access to cheap refrigerants and propellants was everything from inconvenient to harmful to fatal to various stakeholders.

If I recall, and connot find a reference for this, the Ozone hole was first observed by a group of Dutch scientists in the early 50’s, before widespread usage of CFC’s. Perhaps the ozone teleconnected across time?

As others have noted, the ban killed Halons, about the most effective fire suppressant ever produced. Instant out, and little collateral damage. Inhalers are the most recent travesty. The Montreal Protocol allows the use of CFC’s if there is no reasonable alternative. Political pressure forced the inhaler change.

Then there is Columbia. Wing smash by a piece of non-cfc foam. When NASA switched in about 2000, they saw a major increase in damage. Old tanks with CFC foam didn’t do it, new tanks did. But, they couldn’t switch back, becauseof a memo ordering all government agencies to comply with the M.P.

There is his “daisyworld” paradox. According to this theory, extra solar input equals colder climate, because reflective vegetation will be advantaged as it will stay cooler in the warming climate, which results in a cooler climate, which seems absurd to me.

Then he says that the ice-ages are caused by the Earths temperature regulation system running down and failing in its old age. His logic appears to be that because the Earth has various regulatory control systems, and a biological system also has various regulatory control systems, then the Earth is also such a biological system that ages in a biological fashion.

I am sure that he has done some important work and made some significant discoveries, but everything he says must be treated with the utmost skepticism.

‘Nothing currently suggests that the role of CFCs must be called into question, Rex stresses. “Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss. But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions.”’

Why hasn’t this statement by Lovelock:
“We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked, or incompetently done”

…drawn media attention? When I read this back when it came out, I thought for sure I’d hear about this in the MSM. I never heard one mention of it.

I don’t dispute that CFC’s high up in the atmosphere destroy ozone. However, I’ve never understood why the Antarctic has way more destruction than the Arctic when the bulk of the CFCs were released in the northern hemisphere.

I spent my career in the semiconductor microelectronic business. Back about 1992 some of our customers required that we phase out CFCs in our processes, to comply with the Montreal Protocol. The interesting thing is, that without exception, the new processes we had to develop worked better, cost less and provided higher and less variable yields. At least in this area there was a clear benefit, and I’m confident that the impact of better, lower cost microelectronics outweighs any other costs incurred by society. Unintended consequence? Yes. Phase out of CFC bad? not so clear.

John B says:
January 8, 2011 at 1:37 pm
“Did anybody get as far as reading the last paragraph of the Nature article?…

‘Nothing currently suggests that the role of CFCs must be called into question, Rex stresses. “Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss. But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions.”’

Or do you discount the bits you don’t like?”

Oh, i like the “But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions.” bit very much. It screams uncertainty. Someone at Nature must have been asleep.

They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.
Information, knowledge, is material as anything else in the Universe, thus it can not be infinitely divided…
It´s like a Pie…the more people eats the less for each one. Sorry if this is not “progressive” but it is unfortunately real. Thus, there are a lot of “scientists” who could be great technicians instead: good carpenters, plumbers; and they would live happier lives, without having the stress and the remorse of “Selling their Souls to the Devil” :-)

Why believe data when you have models?http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/measures-to-save-ozone-stemmed-a.html?ref=hp
“SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Now, for a change, some good news on the environmental front. Global efforts launched in 1989 to stem emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—volatile chemicals, used as refrigerants and propellants in spray cans, that break down ozone—have borne fruit not only by protecting ozone in the atmosphere but also by preventing even more dramatic atmospheric heating. That’s because, like carbon dioxide, CFCs in the atmosphere trap heat. New studies, presented here last month at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show that had humanity not cut this pollution, Earth would have experienced as much as 1.5ºC of additional global warming by 2070. Moreover, the new projections show, CFC pollution would have thinned the layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere, which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation, even more than scientists expected, as a result of an unforeseen “feedback” effect.”
“The modeling drives home the point that the ban on CFCs constitutes a monumental environmental success story. “There’s a tendency of people sometimes to say, ‘Did we need to do this?’ ” says atmospheric scientist Darryn Waugh of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who didn’t collaborate on the research. Had the world not clamped down on CFCs, “these are pretty dramatic things that would have occurred.” Applaud humanity for doing the smart thing—or quake at the thought of the bullet we unwittingly dodged.”

I’ve always wondered about the ozone hole theory as well. Most recently the article on hydroxyl oxidizing pollutants made me wonder about the chemistry some more. If hydroxl forms in the presence of light then one would expect the very long summer as the poles to produce more hydroxyl during that period which would break down more ozone (not taking into account the smaller amount of light the poles get in general).

Also, hasn’t the UV part of the solar spectrum been increasing? Would that imply more hydroxl is being formed and therefore more ozone is being broken down.

The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

Rate is not important. If photolysis is essential in splitting CFCs then why the ozone layer is thinner at the poles, where there is less light. If CFCs were the cause of the ill-named ozone hole, the hole should be in the equator, where the stratosphere receives more light.

I always found it interesting how the ozone hole is always found in the vicinity of a weak spot in the earth’s magnetic field. This leans me do think that solar radiation is ripping apart O3 atoms in that area. The only problem is our poles would show the same thing.

However there is a interesting aspect to solar radiation. CMEs have polarity. North polarization is ok because it strengthens the field and particles bounce off the reinforced field. South actually causes the field to collapse, delivering radiation to lower levels.

On top of that I wonder if the more northly location of the hole from the pole might set itself up as a dump-off spot on the way to the pole.

As others have noted, the ban killed Halons, about the most effective fire suppressant ever produced. Instant out, and little collateral damage. Inhalers are the most recent travesty. The Montreal Protocol allows the use of CFC’s if there is no reasonable alternative. Political pressure forced the inhaler change.

Freon was also the best anti-burn treatment. It was sold in spray cans. If sprayed on a burn within the first minute or so, the pain was 100% gone, and the blistered skin (if any) just dried up and fell off in the next few days. No pain, no infection potential. I worked in and around 420°F equipment at the time of the Montreal Protocol, and we never found anything to deal with burns like freon did.

Off topic: An amazing discovery for me was dealing with highly polished steel surfaces that were at that 420°F temp. The emissivity of polished steel was nearly zero, so I could get within perhaps 1/2 mm or so and not feel ANY heat coming off – but if I closed that 1/2 mm to zero, OUCH! Bring out the freon! It was freaking dangerous. We got IR cameras to try to measure the actual surface temps, looking for temp anomalies, and the cameras were totally useless, because of the almost non-existent emissivity. No heat was being radiated. I learned with that and other projects how it is not temperature that is important, but heat flow/heat transfer. I’ve held certain 420°F materials in my bare hands and they felt barely warm. People have held red hot Space Shuttle tiles in their bare hands and not gotten burned.

I remember when the ozone “hole” was first discovered (late 80’s?) I read an article that stated that scientists didn’t know if it had always been there or not. There was some conjecture that maybe it was caused or aggravated by CFC emissions but no one jumped to any conclusion at that time. Then that whole discussion just disappeared into thin air. In fact, I never again saw any acknowledgment that the first time we looked………….we found it.

For those who wonder why there is not one over the North Pole:
I am by no means an expert but, as I understand it ozone chemistry is highly dependent on temperature and incident radiation. The Antarctic is much colder than the Arctic. I believe I read that on average the WARMEST month in the Antarctic is only 12C warmer than the COLDEST month in the Arctic. Obviously, because the South Pole is covered by land not ocean. For those who care, there is no trend whatsoever in ozone concentration measured at Mauna Loa for the last 50 odd years. The real travesty is what environmentalism has done to science Dr. T.

What can I say? Nullify Montreal Protocol. It is based on bogus science just as as much as global warming is based on bogus science. And I mean demonstrably bogus in both cases. Then bring back freon as a refrigerant, both for scientific and economic reasons. It is better and cheaper than its substitutes.

You are right on the mark. Ozone is paramagnetic, unlike most other gases. The CFC hypothesis of ozone depletion has been falsified on many front for years, but the eco-wackos never adjust their suppositions.

To begin with, there is no ozone “hole”. Most of the “crises” that we will face in the future come from instrumental interpretations that are based on sometimes arbitrary assumptions. For example, an instrument may be way more accurate today, but the sampling is defective. GIGO results. As a physical organic chemist, I see this all the time. The second corrupting factor tends to be the lack of understanding of statistics. People are measuring things now down to the parts per quadrillion, with sampling errors in the parts per thousand. Useless data results. We are seeing such a thing with land and ocean temperature measurement. I could go on and on with examples.

The “ozone hole” is unique. Within only a few decades of its discovery it was blamed on mankind. Perhaps one day some sharp researcher will devise a proxy method to go back in the geological record and take a look at what history might tell us. I maintain that more than likely the “ozone hole” has always been there…it’s caused by…winter.

To accept the CFC theory one must accept a LOT and ignore even more. Think of all the chemicals that mankind emits and then consider that these are dwarfed by gases and chemicals emitted by nature (see Craig Idso’s work). Consider that Mt. Erebus is in Antarctica. It was “discovered” in the late 19th century (and was erupting). It has been been continuously erupting since at least 1971, belching tons and tons of halogens into the atmosphere every year. Where is a similar volcano in the northern hemisphere?

I don’t doubt that CFCs could theoretically migrate to the stratosphere and catalyze the destruction of ozone. But so could a VERY long list of LOT of other chemicals, most of which are natural in origin. I’ve read a lot of insipid comments here today. My favorite was the mixing of gases like sugar in water. CO2 does this, CFCs do not. For example, vaporize some iodine in a closed vessel. The very heavy iodine vapor will collect at the bottom of the vessel. Sure, there will be elevated iodine levels at the top relative to pure, outside air but the iodine concentration will steadily increase as you sample closer to the bottom of the vessel. Even in gaseous form, gravity is a bitch. Then take a glass rod and stir everything up. Cork it and let it sit for a day or so and see what happens. The iodine vapor will settle out to the bottom. The gas is indeed, miscible in air, but gravity draws it earthward because of the difference in density. Some gases freely mix in air whereas others do not. I have no doubt that some CFCs might find their way to the upper atmosphere. What I don’t know is at what concentration and is this actually significant or simply something that can be measured.

I don’t know if the “ozone hole” is “natural” or not. I most certainly don’t know if mankind has any influence over it or not (and neither do the researchers). What is quite obvious is that it seems to fit a convenient political and financial agenda.

And it's far less than one atmosphere of pressure in the stratosphere. As you get higher up, the molecular weight matters more and more. Further out, atmospheric gasses separate by weight. While there is still mixing of heavier molecules in the stratosphere, it's not as effective as it is lower down, and even at sea level they tell you to crawl out of a smoke-filled room.

Roughly, the molecular weight of CF2Cl2 is 121. Compare that with 32 for O2, 28 for N2, 40 for Ar, 18 for H2O and 44 for CO2.

Note also that for transporting chlorine into the stratosphere, HCl and NaCl are both lighter and more abundant than CF2Cl2.

I still remember when Voyager was approaching Uranus, and all they had to show us was one great big ozone hole staring back from the gloom.

And then Venus, them Venusians have us beat. They have two ozone holes, one at each end! Poor Europe. Invested all that money to get in on the space game and they have to tap dance around Venus. That’s a head buster innit.
How to report on their discovery without comparing Venus’ ozone holes with the one on Earth?

IPCC Professor Calls For “Elite Warrior Leadership” To Rule Over Eco-Dictatorship
“An influential professor who worked as an assessor for the United Nations IPCC has called for democracy to be replaced with an eco-dictatorship where enslaved masses are ruled over by an “elite warrior leadership” and forced to adhere to a new green religion, in yet another shocking example of how prominent global warming alarmists are revealing themselves as dangerous eco-fascists.

Professor David Shearman, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University’s Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences and Law School. Shearman was an Assessor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report and the Fourth Assessment Report.

In his writings, Shearman, who labels humanity a “malignant eco-tumour” and an “ecological cancer,” says that “authoritarianism is the natural state of humanity” and that in order to save the planet from man-made climate change, an “elite warrior leadership” needs to be formed that will “battle for the future of the earth”.”

“…The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere – almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate…”

And yet again, we return to a previous story – the one about the SORCE satellite.

You know, the story in which an instrument on the satellite shows LOWER THAN EXPECTED levels in the UV range, and HIGHER THAN EXPECTED levels in the IR ranges.

So the “orders of magnitude lower” just may be caused by “orders of magnitude difference” in the suns SPECTRUM (while TSI wasn’t changing, the spectrum was.)

And, as further testing is done, they just might find an unknown cycle in the sun’s spectrum.

I see an eco-crisis research-industrial complex, closely following the highly successful model of the military-industrial complex, promoting fear and selling protection from real and imaginary enemies. Now they want to battle climate change, and they say it will be very expensive.

This post and comments shows how an open society may contribute to meaningful debate and to the historical record, e.g.Jim Owen, ( knew the person who dicovered the ozone hole, who said…) … pertinent sceptical comments by E.M Smith, James Sexton, Paul Vaughn and Stephen Wilde, and witty demolitions of the Precautionary Principle by Ric Loche, Richard Verney et al. This, by RL is worthy of wide dissemination: ‘The Precautionary [Principle] tells us that we should never, ever turn our affairs over to an idealogue with an agenda.’ :>)

The point I am trying to make is that I don’t think it is right to take Rex’s work as if it is a damning indctment of previous science and then discount the guy’s own conclusion.

All he was saying was, “there appears to be data that shows we don’t understand everything about CFC breakdown” and then “but there is still enough other evidence to suggest that anthropogenic CFCs and halons are the cause of ozone loss”.

Either take the whole piece of work or discount the whole piece, otherwise you will be accused of cherry picking.

If we want to be taken seriously, it is better to accept scientific reality and fight the dubious policy decisions and unjustified speculation (like “this particular drought was caused by AGW”). There doesn’t seem to be any serious science that questions the role of CFCs – even Rex’s paper was later rebutted and pretty much retracted – so move on to where AGW proponents are weakest, which IMHO is predicting how bad things are going to get in the future.

hadnt we better ban Lightning as well? it creates Ozone.
and if cholrine based chem is an issue?
how come we all get pushed to use chlorine bleach to high amounts in homes?
ie nappies whites etc..
suspected Ozone was a fiddle, when I realised agw was the same style of panic and fearmongering, nice to have it confirmed.

Joe scandalises
————-
The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature:
————–
So Joe has found a breathless ozone hole article from 2007 and presents it as new news. It was based on preliminary results from one experiment as far as I can tell. After 3 years I figure the measurement will have been either confirmed or found wanting.

So I think I am going to poke around to see what the eventual outcome was.

Joe falsely claims
———
LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY
———
Sorry Joe, but I did a check. It appears that your claim of new research dated 2007 was wrong due to impurities in the matrix. In 2009 someone made some better measurements.

The ozone hole reaction mechanism is still fine.

Just do a google for the chemical species described in the Nature paper and it pops up straight away.

And Joe i think you need to fact check all that other stuff you claimed for ozone hole research as well. Could be embarrassing if it turned out you were repeating lies and it happens that you were so easily fooled because it was what you wanted to hear.

Jim Owen claims
———-
Since I knew the person who “discovered” the Hole, I asked him about it. The answer was that the Hole was real, but the “science” was pure hype. His theory was that it was a natural occurrence that varied on a periodic basis based on factors that were never later pursued. He was NOT the person who was credited with discovering the Hole – that person stole the credit by pubishing first.
————-
And who was that person who has been claiming that someone stole the credit? This is sounding like rubbish and sour grapes to me.

If memory serves NASA did not discover the ozone hole. So who do you think got the credit fit it?

Uh oh. Troll on board. LT, your theories are all hot air. For decades researchers have been looking for CFC’s with instrument balloons over Antarctica, but they haven’t found any. No CFC’s there. Maybe the CFC’s kill the ozone somewheres else, and then all the ozone leaves Antarctica to fill the voids thousands of miles away? Kind of like Maxwell’s demon of the stratosphere? Is that your model? Why don’t you prove it, LT?

Lazy Teenager,
How about you work to get rid of the “lazy” part of your moniker, go and find the enthalpy-pressure diagrams for freon and 134A working fluids and then construct on those diagrams the refrigeration cycle. Let us all know what you find out.

Apparently you did not read either research paper. Neither paper proves their point. The only conclusion is that we still do not know and we now have better information that the original estimates of the reaction speed were WRONG as BOTH of the new studies show a slower reaction time!!

The only real data we have is that stopping production of CFC’s has made NO difference in the appearance of the Antarctic Ozone hole. You may also want to ponder on the FACT that the Arctic, which is much closer to all the evil CFC production, never had much of a hole and still doesn’t. The factors making up the ozone hole have little to do with anthropogenic activities.

Clarification: I’m not a climate change skeptic. Nonalarmist is a better term in my case; however I realize that I’m perhaps somewhat of an exception in this regard because although the vast majority of WUWT participants are not climate change skeptics, many are clearly alarmed by climate politics &/or ice ages. Regardless of what category people feel they fit in, ‘climate change skeptic’ is a misnomer for the vast majority here. Perhaps the key to accuracy is in always specifying what kind of skeptic – i.e. skeptical of what? Certainly most here are not skeptical that the climate changes naturally. My interest is in understanding nature.

Before I address some of the claims made above, it is worthwhile pointing out Steve McIntyre’s long-standing advice to skeptics: “Your argument is only as strong as your weakest point”. To the extent some of the comments about CFCs and ozone expressed here can be linked to AGW skepticism, that hurts the cause. When I have to admit that some of Lazy Teenager’s comments are more intelligent than some of the “skeptics,” it ruins my day.

But moving on, there have been several comments that doubt that atmospheric diffusion of CFCs can lead to their presence in the stratosphere. Some are honest questions, which I don’t have a problem with. Others, however, are dogmatic comments with no supporting data, other than “I know I’m right”. The latest was from Mike D. I’d like to see a citation Mike.

Dr. Dave doesn’t like my sugar analogy, I’ll admit that perhaps my sugar analogy was not perfect. What analogy ever is? But why use analogies when we have data?

Because the stratosphere is a reactive environment for CFCs, here, their concentrations do decrease with altitude, but that’s because of UV degradation. The much less reactive (and heavier than air) SF6 is more uniformally dispersed in the stratosphere (hence its proposed use as a “tracer).

There are a number of errors made in previous posts about the history and known processes involved in ozone creation and depletion. If I may offer some corrections.

First,-The level of ozone in the antarctic had been measured for several decades before the use of CFCs. Dobson had designed a spectrometer in the 1920s to detect ozone levels. By measuring the ozone level during the polar winter when the UV synthesis of ozone should cease he was able to demonstrate the role of the Brewster-Dobson circulation in transporting ozone created in the equatorial region to the poles. As expected there were lower, but not zero levels during the winter. Then levels rose when sunlight returned to the polar vortex.

However because ozone is only made by photochemical reactions involving UV, but depleted by many other chemical reactions it was known that the presence of chemical radicals in the stratosphere could significantly alter the balance of ozone synthesis/depletion. Various possible risk chemicals were considered including water vapour, nitrous compounds, and chlorine from the sea.
It was theoretically possible that the chemically stable CFCs would be responsible for extra ozone depletion when sunlight returned to the antarctic polar vortex causing a decrease in ozone levels in the spring when they were predicted, and observed to rise due to UV photochemical synthesis.

When falling spring levels of ozone were observed in the Antarctic in the 70s the one remaining issues was whether CFCs were present in the polar stratosphere and whether any other halogen compounds, such as natural chlorine compounds from the surface could also be present.

Observations with balloons and with a refitted U2 spy plane showed that CFCs were present in the stratosphere, despite their ‘heavy’ molecular weight. And natural chlorine compounds are to reactive and water soluble to reach the stratosphere in significant amounts. Later isotope studies confirmed the industrial origin of the halogens causing the ozone depletion at the S pole.

The ozone holes at the S polar vortex are a result of the CFCs ozone depletion effect being significantly enhanced by the extreme cold, stratospheric crystals of acid and sunlight combining to provide a bigger catalyst effect from the CFCs on ozone depletion. It is an amplified, and dramatic reduction in ozone because of local conditions, but confirms the process that will inevitable occur at lower intensities through the stratosphere including in the equatorial regions where most ozone is created.

The possibility that the S polar ozone holes were a periodic natural phenomena that coincidentally reappeared when CFC levels in the stratosphere rose is unlikely because in increased UV exposure was a frequent past event around the Antarctic there would be evolutionary adaption by biological systems to the damage that it can cause.

Here in California we are supposed to be under the thickest portion of the ozone layer. Presumably this would give us maximum UV protection, and yet we have +12 UV index days routinely during the summer.

Oh btw did you know Saturn has an ozone hole? It’s huge. It could swallow our planet whole without so much as a burp afterwards.

Qing-Bin Lu,
Department of Physics and Astronomy and Departments of Biology and Chemistry, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada
Accepted 26 November 2009.
editor: S. Peyerimhoff.
Available online 3 December 2009.

Abstract

The cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces has been proposed as a new mechanism for the formation of the polar ozone hole. Here, experimental findings of dissociative electron transfer reactions of halogenated molecules on ice surfaces in electron stimulated desorption, electron trapping and femtosecond time-resolved laser spectroscopic measurements are reviewed. This is followed by a review of the evidence from recent satellite observations of this new mechanism for the Antarctic ozone hole, and all other possible physical mechanisms are discussed. Moreover, new observations of the 11-year cyclic variations of both polar ozone loss and stratospheric cooling and the seasonal variations of CFCs and CH4 in the polar stratosphere are presented, and quantitative predictions of the Antarctic ozone hole in the future are given. Finally, a new observation of the effects of CFCs and cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion on global climate change is also presented and discussed.

kuhnkat: That blurb is sort of short on hard facts. It doesn’t particularly impress me that CF2CL2 was detected ***right at a volcano vent*** to be 400X times the background amount in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is big…If it is only 400X right at the vent, chances are that its contribution spread out over the entire atmosphere is going to be pretty small. The article doesn’t really challenge the fundamental claim that the current atmospheric levels of almost all of the CFCs and similar ozone-depleting compounds are due to man-made contributions. Its goal seems to be merchandizing doubt without really presenting any hard evidence to counter the basic accepted scientific facts.

Urederra reckons
——-
Rate is not important. If photolysis is essential in splitting CFCs then why the ozone layer is thinner at the poles, where there is less light. If CFCs were the cause of the ill-named ozone hole, the hole should be in the equator, where the stratosphere receives more light.
——-
Err no. CFC’s are tough molecules. It takes a good whacking with UV to break them apart.

Tthe research has been done. Some blogger simply making up stuff does not cut the mustard.

The process of ozone depletion is quite complex. Cold is an important factor. That’s why the Arctic has a smaller ozone hole than the Antarctic.

There’s no excuse for making stuff up when there is good info available and easily accessible.

Bubbagyro reckons
———–
To begin with, there is no ozone “hole”. Most of the “crises” that we will face in the future come from instrumental interpretations that are based on sometimes arbitrary assumptions. For example, an instrument may be way more accurate today, but the sampling is defective. GIGO results. As a physical organic chemist, I see this all the time.
———-
This is so confused. Can I conclude from this the existence of physical organic chemist who does not understand or does not have confidence in UV spectrometry.

And that an ozone hole measured by both satellite and from the ground can’t possibly exist?

Dr Dave says
————
The very heavy iodine vapor will collect at the bottom of the vessel. Sure, there will be elevated iodine levels at the top relative to pure, outside air but the iodine concentration will steadily increase as you sample closer to the bottom of the vessel. Even in gaseous form, gravity is a bitch.
———-
Have you actually done this experiment? Properly, without solid iodine present. Once you have, and it still establishs a concentration gradient, could you try stirring it permanently to simulate a real atmosphere.

The theory for segregation of gases by molecular weight due to gravity is well established. Try calculating it for freons.

Tom_R says
———-
And it’s far less than one atmosphere of pressure in the stratosphere. As you get higher up, the molecular weight matters more and more. Further out, atmospheric gasses separate by weight.
———-
Hand waving. Prove it! Show me the numbers.

Mike D says
———
Uh oh. Troll on board. LT, your theories are all hot air. For decades researchers have been looking for CFC’s with instrument balloons over Antarctica, but they haven’t found any. No CFC’s there
———
Prove it. Citation required.

Since CFC’s are everywhere I am going to make a wild guess that with the right instrumentation you can detect them anywhere on the planet. Including Antarctica.

“Whose studies? Can you provide references?
Where is the data available please?”

I can’t remember the source of the original isotope work, but given the source I also can’t resist posting this –
J. C. Laube, J. Kaiser, W. T. Sturges, H. Bönisch and A. Engel. Chlorine isotope fractionation in the stratosphere. Science, September 2, 2010
Reported for popular consumption here –http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11166140

“It is established that different manufacturing techniques will produce gases with particular isotopic ratios. Such information could help the authorities identify continuing sources. ”
—–
Re-increased UV exposure
@-Tallbloke-“Can you point us to studies of the damage done to biological systems please.”

I found a paper that specifically addresses the influence that UV has on biological ecologies from the Antarctic variations. –

I don’t know if any research has been done on sediments that would show possible variations from UV effects in the past. It looks possible that the type of diatoms present might give a proxy indicator of UV levels – no doubt with numerous other interacting factors and wide scope for uncertainty!

“For the first time, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) scientists have successfully measured in the ozone layer the chlorine compound ClOOCl, which plays an important role in stratospheric ozone depletion. The doubts in the established models of polar ozone chemistry expressed by American researchers based on laboratory measurements are disproved by these new atmospheric observations. The established role played by chlorine compounds in atmospheric ozone chemistry is in fact confirmed by KIT’s atmospheric measurements.”

Mike says:
January 9, 2011 at 9:09 am
———–
Lazy Teenager,
How about you work to get rid of the “lazy” part of your moniker, go and find the enthalpy-pressure diagrams for freon and 134A working fluids and then construct on those diagrams the refrigeration cycle. Let us all know what you find out.
———–
Mike you made the claim, but you are asking me to prove your claim. I prefer to prove my own claims and not everyone elses claims. Otherwise I would be incredibly busy.

The basics Mike is that:
1. I can go into any store and buy a refrigerator that is cheap and not noticeably more expensive than the old CFC ones. They are probably cheaper.
2. These refrigerators are probably more power efficient than the old CFC ones.
3. The refrigerator compressors seem to be much smaller than the old ones.

On balance I would say the manufacturers have done a good job at adapting and the downsides have been exaggerated on this blog.

As for your claims about pressure and efficiency I note that CFCs and HCFCs are quite similar molecules and therefore I would be surprised to see much difference in there thermodynamic properties.

Furthermore obtaining more efficiency from thermodynamic machines requires going to higher compression ratios. Therefore over time I would expect to see higher compression ratios used in refrigeration compressors irrespective of the actual working fluid being used.

This is nonsense, and illustrates the dangers of getting your science from web blogs. The only substantive point in the article is based on an indirect reference to a paper which questioned the reaction rates of Cl2O2. This paper is not actually referenced but is:Francis D Pope et.al Journal of Physical Chemistry A, volume 111, page 4322 (2007)

The present article quotes from some commentary in Nature about how this might cause a problem, with some quotes from Markus Rex, but omits the last paragraph.

Nothing currently suggests that the role of CFCs must be called into question, Rex stresses. “Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss. But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions.”

Since 2007 further studies have been made, and it turns out that it is Pope’s 2007 paper that is probably in error, not the older measurements. See, for example,
Papanastasiou et.al Journal of Physical Chemistry A, volume 113, page 13711 (2009),
or
Wilmouth et al, Journal of Physical Chemistry A, vol 113, page 14099 (2009)

As for the many misconceptions regarding the ozone ‘hole’, like when it was first noticed, what causes it, when it forms, why it is primarily at the south pole, what molecules are responsible, how they get there etc. etc, try staring with NASA’s ozonewatch site (ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov) and following all the links – for example, this one http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/history.html shows that measurements began in the 1950’s but that a problem was not observed till about 1980.

kuhnkat ad homs
———-
Apparently you did not read either research paper. Neither paper proves their point. The only conclusion is that we still do not know and we now have better information that the original estimates of the reaction speed were WRONG as BOTH of the new studies show a slower reaction time!!
———-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19240934
This is the later paper that supersedes the one in Joe’s article.

I’m glad that k. draws attention to the importance of reading conprehension skills.

A number of important points from the
2009 article.
1. The 2007 paper is in conflict with both the new data and multiple previous work. This means the 2007 work is an outlier and therefore most probably wrong.
2. The 2009 research has the benefit of hindsight and performed multiple checks on the validity of their own work.
3. The new absorption constant is consistent with the previous understanding of ozone depletion.
Therefore the newer paper has very very likely produced the correct result.

Izen knows what he is talking about
———
There are a number of errors made in previous posts about the history and known processes involved in ozone creation and depletion. If I may offer some corrections.
………
……..
———–
Read what he says. Believe it.

Guillermo Gefaell says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reactions of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces: Implications for atmospheric ozone depletion and global climate change
————
Thus refers to a scientific psper. Apparently there was some controversy at the time, came across it by google accident a few minutes ago.

Seems this work got shot down in flames. Before people get to keen on this paper to make CFC’s go away they should also read the followup papers and get a sense of the arguments used in the debate.

And no dumba—– ed superficial skimming to pick up out of context phrases. You know you do it.

Guillermo Gefaell says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Cosmic-ray-driven electron-induced reactions of halogenated molecules adsorbed on ice surfaces: Implications for atmospheric ozone depletion and global climate change
————
This refers to a scientific paper. Apparently there was some controversy at the time, came across it by google accident a few minutes ago.

Seems this work got shot down in flames. Before people get to keen on this paper to make CFC’s go away they should also read the followup papers and get a sense of the arguments used in the debate.

And no dumba—– ed superficial skimming to pick up out of context phrases. You know you do it.

kuhnkat says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:56 pm
——–
We are inundated with the idea that CFC’s and chlorine compounds in general are ONLY produced by anthropogenic means. Please read this little blurb and then go find the reality:

Let me get this straight. We’re concerned about exposure to solar UV raditaion in the high latitudes during the polar winter when the sun ain’t shining there?

No, people are concerned about UV exposure in the summer at high latitudes, because the ozone ‘hole’ (more exactly ozone depletion as it never goes to zero) which develops in the Arctic and Antarctic spring (particularly the Antarctic) and which remains until the summer before then reducing. If you live in Australia or New Zealand you are advised to take precautions.

Since 2007 further studies have been made, and it turns out that it is Pope’s 2007 paper that is probably in error, not the older measurements. See, for example,
Papanastasiou et.al Journal of Physical Chemistry A, volume 113, page 13711 (2009),
or
Wilmouth et al, Journal of Physical Chemistry A, vol 113, page 14099 (2009)

I am sure that Joe D’Aleo will be along shortly to correct his errors in this post and set the record straight. Certainly the sort of thing that an AMS fellow would want to do if he wants to be worthy of the honor given to him by his peers in the meterological community.

The earliest measurements occurred in the 1950s. Readings approaching 100du were recorded at that time. The coining of the term “ozone hole” occurred in the 1980s. It was not possible to call it a “hole” (a misnomer) until after satellite data was available. Those readings in the 50s are not significantly different than the readings of the satellite era in the hole.

A reading of 110du was recorded at the French Antarctic Observatory at Dumont d’Urville in the spring of 1958. As published by Rigaud and Leroy [Annales Geophysicae (November, 1990)]. Source: http://junkscience.com/Ozone/ozone_seasonal.html

docattheautopsy says:
January 8, 2011 at 10:01 am
I can’t help but notice this is both seasonal and isolated, and that the conditions center around the cold forming “natural” ozone depletion agents (and, by the by, the Ozone Hole Website states CFCs are formed by sulfuric acid, nitric acid and ice, which is interesting as none of those molecules contain either carbon or chlorine).

No it says that the CFCs are broken down into the depletion agents by reactions on the surface of clouds formed from sulfuric acid, nitric acid and ice.

kuhnkat says:
January 9, 2011 at 9:37 am
The only real data we have is that stopping production of CFC’s has made NO difference in the appearance of the Antarctic Ozone hole. You may also want to ponder on the FACT that the Arctic, which is much closer to all the evil CFC production, never had much of a hole and still doesn’t. The factors making up the ozone hole have little to do with anthropogenic activities.

Your moniker “Lazy” is apparently appropriate.

Actually LT is on the money, the one who deserves the moniker of ‘lazy’ is you!

You are right on the mark. Ozone is paramagnetic, unlike most other gases. The CFC hypothesis of ozone depletion has been falsified on many front for years, but the eco-wackos never adjust their suppositions.

“…the ozone ‘hole’ (more exactly ozone depletion as it never goes to zero)….”

I think your perspective is backwards! No mechamism for ‘depletion’ is needed to explain the observed distribution. Only that atmospheric mixing is not always adequate to create the distribution that you assume to be the normal natural conditon.

Isn’t the amount of incident UV radiation per unit area at any given time (when measured normal to the propagation direction of the sun’s rays) constant over the area of the earth exposed to the sun? If so, then the UV intensity per unit area of the atmosphere will be at a maximum where the propagation direction of the sun’s rays are normal to the surface of the atmoshpere (i.e. at a point somewhere between 23N and 23S depending on the season). And, since the intensity per unit area will decrease with increasing latitude (as the constant amount of incident UV per unit cross sectional area is distributed over a progressively larger area of the atmosphere), the amount of ozone formation and resulting ozone concentration will decrease proportionally.

Fhsiv, your perspective would not explain why the ozone concentration over Antarctica decreases sharply in the southern spring just as UV intensity is building up, and you would expect ozone production to increase from its winter lull.

Doug Badgero, I would have to check the origin of your figure in that reference more carefully, but it does not look very convincing considering the record given on this site, http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/history.html which is continuous from 1957 and shows values of ~300DU as typical for October.

izen:
“It was theoretically possible that the chemically stable CFCs would be responsible for extra ozone depletion when sunlight returned to the antarctic polar vortex causing a decrease in ozone levels in the spring when they were predicted, and observed to rise due to UV photochemical synthesis.”

jimmi:
“Fhsiv, your perspective would not explain why the ozone concentration over Antarctica decreases sharply in the southern spring just as UV intensity is building up, and you would expect ozone production to increase from its winter lull.”
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Analysis of the stratospheric temperatures and geopotential heights confirms that the spring-to-spring ozone changes closely follow the changes of the thermobaric field, and that the rapid increase of ozone (and stratospheric temperature) in the spring is dependent on the time of the polar vortex breakdown, when favorable conditions for continuous meridional exchange of ozone-rich air from the middle latitudes are re-established. The stratospheric heating rates and the weak gradient in the vortex central region during early spring provide favorable conditions for weak upward motions, responsible for a substantial part of the ozone loss between the date of the solar penetration of the stratosphere, and the date of the vortex breakdown.
Advances in Space Research, Volume 6, Issue 10, 1986, Pages 89-98
===========

jimmi – your declaration comes with no reasoning, so I can not judge its value.

There is also that glaring anomaly in spring of 2002 that you seem to have overlooked.
Variations in the speed of the polar vortex, as described in the 1986 paper I cited, are generally held to account for that 2002 anomaly.

The reason for the simple no, is simple. That paper is 25 years old and predates nearly everything that has been discovered re. the chemistry of the ozone hole. The 2002 event was due to Antarctica being unusually warm that winter with the result that the Polar Stratospheric Clouds which are a critical component of the process, did not form. (ref. http://www.springerlink.com/content/l621282n7vm561t3/ )

jimmi – note the stamp collection showing ozone concentrations that accompanied this article, with the spring pattern from 1995-2007 showing no relationship to your hypothesis.
Sophistry, bafflegab, appeals to authority, and those shiny badges of merit awarded between monkeys on a bandwagon will never convince me.

The 1986 explanation for the spring depletion demonstrates predictive prowess, accounting for the phenomena we saw in 2002 before it occurred. Your hypothesis, with its redundant misanthropic epicycle, weak explanatory value, and retroactive special pleadings, failed to predict the event.

One of the strange, unreported aspects of the ozone story is that no one seems certian how ozone is formed. Everyone says that it comes from photolysis of O2 and the reaction of O* with further O2 in the presence of a third entity to carry off the excess energy; and there is absolute consensus that O2 photolysis requires <241nm wavelength photons. The trouble is, ozone clearly forms in the stratosphere, and the measurements show no <241nm light still present in the sun's radiation at stratospheric altitudes – it has all been filtered out much higher up. So where does ozone come from? I have posed the question in a wide range of fora, and have yet to have anything other than a mystified response.

The ozone hole pics are also interesting. We know the spring release of ozone destroyers comes from winter concentration of halocarbons on stratospheric ice crystals (the noctilucent clouds), and release of those halocarbons as the sun rises over Antarctica. Is the hole larger because it was colder than normal? I can't find any study of the noctilucent clouds and their volume/area as a function of temperatures. Does anyone know of any?

With regard to the “Scientific Consensus on the Man-Made Ozone Hole ..”, it appears that the pivotal 2007 paper by Pope at al. has been refuted. Wetzel, et al., have published a paper on the “First remote sensing measurements of ClOOCl …” which is available at http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/931/2010/acp-10-931-2010.pdf
I have no idea which end is up on this! Does this lead us anywhere new?